Posts Tagged My Memories of a Future Life

My guest this week has a theory that everyone’s head is carrying a tune – a permanent soundtrack, a default earworm. Her own cerebrum is tuned to Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower, which has special significance when she starts writing as she sees the process of plotting as the search for an escape. And her book centres on two characters who need this escape – sisters who were professional singers, who go through multiple misunderstandings before they find their equilibrium. (Cue Nina Simone: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.) The author is Nadine Matheson and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her Undercover Soundtrack.

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to tap into a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s post is by contemporary fiction author Guy Mankowski @Gmankow

I think music has influenced me in a way that is perhaps unusual. One of my favourite bands, Savages, describes their music as a ‘suit of armour’. I use music to motivate me, empower me, and rouse me into a state of anger that I convert into writing. My favourite album, The Holy Bible by the Manic Street Preachers, contains a set of lyrics which are all about corruption and negativity, and about converting that anger into self-empowerment. During periods of difficulty in my life I’ve returned to that album again and again. The lyrics to my favourite song from it, Faster, capture many of the mantras I live by.

I first wanted to write How I Left The National Grid to capture, in writing, that feeling that music gave me. The mind-set of Savages and The Manics influenced my main character, the singer Robert Wardner, who uses his music to escape the bleakness of his surroundings. But the novel itself was written using various other non-lullabies.

The novel is comprised of two narratives- one, set in the 80s, following Robert Wardner’s rise and fall. The other, set in 2012, as a journalist called Sam tries to track Wardner down for a commissioned book. Whilst spending time in Manchester to research the post-punk scene I was struck by how many times the city has been bulldozed and regenerated in the last few decades. To me, the fragile, futuristic synths in New Order’s music worked as a metaphor for the fragile, futuristic living complexes that have sprouted in recent years. I felt the texture of New Order’s brittle guitars and undulating keyboard lines during the long, searching city walks I took. They inspired Sam’s more hopeful moments in his journey. I think that New Order used synths to evoke a future that then seemed impossibly utopian, given their grim surroundings in urban Manchester.

Aural utopias

In the novel Wardner fronts a band called The National Grid, who similarly try to create aural utopias on record, using whatever instruments they can lay their hands on. Magazine’s album Definitive Gaze and Ultravox’s Astradyne seemed to me the two records that had gone closest to achieving that. Neither are pristine, but their flaws make them all the most charming.
At the start of the novel Sam, and his girlfriend Elsa, are genuinely in thrall of futuristic visions about communal living, having just moved into a luxury apartment block. During the writing of these scenes I played I’m Leaving by Yourcodenameis: Milo again and again. The hard surfaces and polished textures of the song, along with singer Paul Mullen’s lyrics about living in a complex, were very evocative.

David Bowie has been quoted as the godfather of post-punk, and so perhaps fittingly his album Low was incredibly important in the creation of the book. Not least because in one scene, like in the song Always Crashing In The Same Car we see a character driving menacingly around a hotel car park, faster and faster, until a crash seems unavoidable.

Brutalist surfaces

During his car journey to Manchester’s sink estates, in pursuit of Wardner, Sam listens to Joy Division’s Disorder, and he acknowledges the hard interiors of their song, as uncompromising as the unyielding, Brutalist surfaces around him. At other times he doesn’t skirt around cities, but is taken into the dark heart of them. In the scene in which his hunt takes him to a debauched London nightclub I had Marilyn Manson’s Great Big White World play in the background in the prose. The song has a synthetic, artificial, glossy feel to it, as if the arrangement is cased in Lucite. The song felt as Ballardian as the modern nightclub environment. I also used El Perro Del Mar’s Dark Night again and again as muzak during the writing of one scene in which a character experiences a comedown. The lulled vocals and the incessant repetition of that song are somehow addictive, and capture the atmosphere perfectly. This novel could not have been written without the push that such songs gave me.

Guy Mankowski was raised on the Isle of Wight. He was singer in Alba Nova, a band who were described by Gigwise as ‘mythical and evocative’. He trained as a psychologist at the Royal Hospital for Neurodisability in London. The first draft of his debut novel, The Intimates, was written when he was 21 and was chosen as a ‘must-read’ title by New Writing North’s Read Regional campaign. His second novel, Letters from Yelena, was researched in the world of Russian ballet. He was one of the first English people to be given access to The Vaganova Academy, perhaps the most prestigious ballet school in the world. The novel was adapted for the stage and used in GCSE training material by Osiris Educational. How I Left The National Grid was written after a creative writing PhD at Northumbria University under the supervision of Booker nominee Dr Andrew Crumey, and is published by Zer0 Books. Guy’s website is here, his Facebook page is here and you can tweet him on @Gmankow.

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by Audrina Lane@AudrinaLane

As I started 2013 and my 40th birthday I started to think about what I still wanted to do with my life, call it a mid-life crisis bucket list. It was a time to look back into my past from an 80s adolescence to my life today and wonder if I had made the right choices. Music has always been my life blood from watching Top of the Pops in the 70s and wanting to be a dancer in Hot Gossip, right through to the fact that I always have music on in the office, house, car and headphones. Wherever I was working on my novel the music was there.

Happily in February 2013 I found the manuscript and set to work to achieve my dream. The title of my novel is a song Where did your heart go? By Wham, its poignant lyrics and soulful vibe pointed me in the direction my story was going to take. With the local radio station on I decided to bring my idea from 1992 into the present and include music that I loved from the 80s. By setting my novel in 2013 my main character Stephanie Eden, widow, single mother and local radio station DJ is 40 years old. She grew up and experienced love for the first time in 1988. The song that made me remember my first love was First Time by Robin Beck. I listened to this track constantly as the lyrics evoke that breathless yearning when you are hit by love. I needed the music of the era to awaken my memories.

Stephanie’s daughter Charlotte is 16 in 2013 and just experiencing her own break-up. Stephanie remembers her diary from 1988 from when she was 16 and about to embark on her first relationship. Handing the diary to Charlotte she lets her read about how first love was in 1988 compared to 2013. My favourite scene is Stephanie’s first kiss with Lifeguard James, unexpected and beneath the water in the local swimming pool where they met.

I felt his lips on mine, soft and firm against the liquid coolness of the water. We were suspended in a timeless moment’

Stephanie yearns to be a DJ so for every romantic event in her relationship a song comes to mind and for this kiss it was Whenever you need somebody by Rick Astley. Upbeat and hopeful like my character feelings.

You feel for Stephanie when she realises that James is moving away. I needed a song to express the yearning and desperation she feels and I listened to A different corner by George Michael, the lyrics and piano on the track highlighting her yearning and the decision she made that led her to James in the first place. Stephanie has never moved on from her first love, despite her short marriage and the birth of her daughter. James has kept appearing in her memories every time she hears a song from the past. How many of us have experienced the same thing when you hear a certain song?

Music was such a powerful memory tool and one that I could never silence no matter the pain it bought.’

Charlotte loves music, influenced by her mum’s career and also her own dreams of becoming a dancer. I hope you are all seeing the parallel’s in my own ambitions?? At a dance competition Charlotte meets Mitchell and with a shared love of the film Dirty Dancing they re-create the iconic dance to the song I’ve had the time of my life, it becomes the first song of their relationship.

She could almost hear the music in her head, just louder than the beating of her heart as they moved together in perfect synchronicity.’

The book follows both characters through their sexual awakening and each of these scenes was easier to write with a song playing for the characters. For Stephanie and James I found it in the beautiful lyrics of George Michael’s Father Figure, for Charlotte and Mitchell with She’s like the wind by Patrick Swayze. As Stephanie watches her daughter falling in love she wonders if she should give love one more try?

In a way the soundtrack of my teenage years became those of the characters I was bringing to life and recreated that magical feeling of first love.

Audrina Lane lives in Herefordshire with her partner and two dogs. She works full time for the Herefordshire Library service which means she is surrounded by books every day. Where Did Your Heart Go? was released in July 2013 and her second book, Un-Break my Heart, was released in December 2014. She is currently working on the third. Find her on Facebook, Twitter @AudrinaLane and her website.

My guest this week brings a real blast of the 1980s, with a bright red emphasis on romance (I guess it’s that time of year). She drew on the soundtrack of her adolescent years to create the love-torn characters in her novel, and the heart of the story beats to George Michael, Berlin and Patrick Swayze. She is Audrina Lane and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her Undercover Soundtrack.

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by award-winning journalist and contemporary women’s fiction author Karen Wojcik Berner @karenberner

I was a singer way before I was a writer. Nothing on a grand scale, although I was asked to try out for the Lyric Opera children’s chorus, which I turned down because I hated opera and didn’t recognize the value of the musical education I would have received. What did I know? I was only ten. I settled for local variety shows, high school musicals, and choirs. Wise? Probably not, but then I wouldn’t have discovered writing.

Only natural then that music helped me create the Bibliophiles series, which revolves around members of a classics book club. Not your typical series, each book stars one or two of the book club members and tells their stories. Tragedy. Coming of Age. Romance. You never know what you’re going to get.

Small and helpless

The first is A Whisper to a Scream, which I’m sure you’ll recognize as the title of an Icicle Works song from the 80s. Most people think A Whisper to a Scream is a mystery novel, but if you listen to the lyrics of the song, it’s really about feeling small and ‘ever helpless’ in the face of a greater force, which is exactly what the book is about.

Overwhelmed stay-at-home mother of two Sarah Anderson feels adrift in a sea of diapers, Legos, and school projects. Her workaholic husband is never home, and she longs for just 10 minutes to herself to reclaim the person she was pre-kids. When she finally gets out of the house and joins a classics book club, she meets Annie Jacobs, a public relations executive. Annie’s infertility treatments send her spiraling out of control. What starts as a mere notion, a small whisper of the promise of motherhood, consumes her, whipping her into a frenzy.

The song’s happy dance beat underscores the need to surrender to circumstance, something both Sarah and Annie eventually do at the end.

Tell me Y

Having never written from a male perspective, I was worried Annie’s husband John could easily become a stereotype. After all, who do you think of when a couple is dealing with fertility issues? Not the guy.

When John sensed his marriage was coming undone, I’d listen to Peter Gabriel’s tender, yet melancholy Blood of Eden, which perfectly captured what John felt as his wife spun out of control in a vortex of hormones, emotion, and deep craving that he cannot understand. He missed the intimacy of their life before sex became mechanical.

Was this guy married to Annie too? He tipped his glass to Peter Gabriel, comrade in misery.’

A Whisper to a Scream
Several years ago, I bought the Indigo Girls album Rite of Passage. One track is Galileo, which talks about reincarnation and how many times must we go around until we finally get this life thing right. But instead of reincarnation, I envisioned a young woman who kept reinventing herself from location to location. That became Until My Soul Gets It Right, about another classics book club member, Catherine Elbert.

She was a fraud. Had been for years.’

Until My Soul Gets It Right

I’d wanted the final book in the series to be a love story. Opposites attracting is always fun, so why not bring together fastidious Anglophile computer programmer Thaddeus Mumblegarden IV and the free-spirited daughter of Hippies Spring Pearson in A Groovy Kind of Love?

The chance to delve into the 60s and the Pearsons’ background was too much fun to resist. Only a small child when the Hippies embarked on their psychedelic journey, I was drawn to their sense of freedom, something I had never felt growing up as an only child.

Every day while writing Spring’s childhood, the velvety smooth vocals of Jim Morrison in The Doors’ classic Light My Fire showed me a window to their world and explored quintessential sixties sounds. I mean, does anyone use an organ like that anymore? Aquariusbelted out by the 5th Dimension and originally from the musical Hair signified pure freedom. Anything was possible if you opened your mind and let the sunshine in. That bass line underscores the funkiness of the dance. You can’t help but move.

That’s how I felt about the Pearsons. Sure, they might be potheads who left their eleven-year-old daughter in charge of their juice bar, but you can’t help but like them.

In contrast, Thaddeus’s family is traditional, and he, himself, is more formal. The Brandenburg Concertos played on repeat while writing his chapters. They helped me focus on structure and complexity. While driving, Thaddeus puts on the local classical music radio station hoping for Handel or a medieval madrigal.

Instead one of John Cage’s twentieth-century avant garde sonatas accosted him, which he immediately turned off with disgust. Better no music than that trash!’

A Groovy Kind of Love

Music helps my imagination find its sense of time and place. It’s almost hypnotic. As soon as one of my inspiration songs plays, I’m back in the 60s with the Pearsons, bouncing from coast to coast with Catherine, or drinking scotch with John. I really cannot write without it.

Karen Wojcik Berner writes contemporary women’s fiction, including the Bibliophiles series. An award-winning journalist, her work has appeared in several magazines, newspapers, and blogs, including the Chicago Tribune, Writer Unboxed, Women’s Fiction Writers, and Fresh Fiction. She is a member of the Chicago Writers’ Association. When not writing, she can be found on the sidelines of her youngest’s football or lacrosse games, discussing the Celts with the oldest, or snuggling into a favorite reading chair with a good book and some tea. Find her on Goodreads, Facebook, her blog, Google +, and Twitter @karenberner

My guest this week says she was a singer long before she was a writer, and when she started writing, music was a natural place to find story inspiration. She writes a series of novels based around the members of a book club, and many of the titles and characters come from tracks that have been special to her. I took unashamed pleasure in seeing Icicle Works and Peter Gabriel make an appearance – the latter with Sinead O’Connor (gasp). And one of her books was inspired by a track by Indigo Girls, which talks about reincarnation and the soul reinventing – possibly a familiar idea to longtime visitors here. Anyway, she is award-winning journalist and contemporary women’s fiction author Karen Wojcik Berner and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her Undercover Soundtrack.

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by wartime romance author Davina Blake (who also writes as Deborah Swift @swiftstory)

Music has always been the mirror of my moods, how I am feeling is externalized by the music I play, so it is fortunate that I have eclectic tastes. When writing I prefer silence, but as I type I am aware of the echo of the music from moments before; it still hums inside me, the undertow to what I am writing.

The edge of longing

I need to be able to access certain states in order to write well, and music helps me do this. What I was trying to capture in Past Encounters was a kind of longing – a longing that borders on nostalgia, but is not that sentimental. It is at the edge of things. We have no English word for it, but the German word is sehnsucht. For this novel I was looking for transparency and intimacy, to keep the words simple so you could almost see through them.

I remembered Mary Chapin Carpenter’s John Doe #24 , which does just this, with its simple tune and narrative arc, telling the story of a blind, deaf and dumb man stripped of identity, the ultimate loss, yet still the character haunts us. In Past Encounters Peter becomes a prisoner of war, just a number, so I went back to the track and listened again. In the song, sensory detail becomes enormously important, his toes feeling the streetcar rails underfoot, the scent of jasmine.

Conjuring the past

In the novel both protagonists, Rhoda and her fiancé Peter, mourn the loss of their familiar life to the outbreak of war. I found myself listening to old recordings to conjure the atmosphere of the past. My mother used to love Lena Horne’s The Man I Love (1941), and the crackling of the LP, the sudden silence when it ends, with just the needle bumping round on the record, seemed to say almost as much as the actual music. When I am working I use Youtube to plug myself into the mood of what I am writing, searching out tracks of the era I am working on. Kate Bush’s recording of the same song with Larry Adler on harmonica really spoke to me. The wailing quality of the harmonica seemed to embody Rhoda’s search for the man she loves, which is both Peter, who is missing, and the longing which is somehow not attached to any one man in particular. It is the same longing that makes me want to write, the stretching out towards a feeling I can’t name.

The story is set in WWII, but it is not about heroes. Rhoda’s fiancé Peter spends the whole war in a prisoner of war camp. But what drives the book is his intense friendships with the other men, and the fact that and he and Rhoda survive on memories of each other. Death stalks the captive prisoners and the music I listened to a lot during this phase of writing consisted of elegies to the dead. Alison Moyet’s great natural voice singing Dido’s Lament by Purcell strips away the artifice of opera to make us think nakedly about memory and how we will be remembered.

Gallows humour

Writing historical fiction is an awkward relationship between honouring and dishonouring our relationship with the past. Gallows humour is an essential part of survival, both for Peter in the book, and for me as a writer, and I loved the recycling of an old English folk tune in Gallows Pole by Led Zeppelin, especially the ultimate twist, when the hangman (death itself) is hanged on the gallows pole.

I like listening to the layers in music, and Gallows Pole is one piece that repays that sort of listening. That sudden mandolin! I like to pick out individual layers and will often listen over and over to the same piece, following different musical parts. I do this in the novel too; write following different narrative threads. In Past Encounters it is just two, Rhoda and Peter, in my other novels it has been more. When I edit, I do this too, follow different lines of the narrative.

Strangely, although Rhoda’s story is set during the filming of Brief Encounter, I found the Rachmaninoff score too strident and brash for the subtle feeling I needed. The Rachmaninoff score is heavy on the piano. As Nick Cave says, ‘The guitar is something you kind of embrace, and the piano is something you kind of – when you play it, you sort of push it away. It feels very different.’

So the intimacy and loss I was after is there in the guitar of Blind Willie McTell by Bob Dylan. It is a track that was never completed from his album Infidels, and is therefore more poignant because it was almost lost. It is raw and unproduced – you can almost hear a coat button scratching on the top of the guitar as he sings of the loss of not just one blues singer, but of the loss of a whole era of blues singers. Of course really it is Mark Knopfler on guitar, not Dylan, but the impression of one man and a guitar remains. Music is like writing, a world of mirrors and illusion.

Davina Blake also writes seventeenth century novels as Deborah Swift. She lives in the North of England in a small village close to the mountains and the sea, a fact which encourages her to go out and get the fresh air that every writer needs. Past Encounters is her fifth novel, but the first published as an independent author. Tweet her as @swiftstory. Find her on Facebook.

GIVEAWAY Davina is excited to be giving away three ebook copies of Past Encounters to commenters here. Extra entries if you share the post on Twitter, G+, Linked In, Tumblr, Facebook, Ello or anywhere else you frequent. Breathe on a bus window and write it inside a love-heart. Just remember to say in your comment here that you’ve done it!

My guest this week is one of those many writers who values silence – but is keenly aware that music is influencing what comes out on the page. She describes how music acts as a portal, letting her access moods and mental states in order to recreate them faithfully in her fiction. She describes trying to capture a state of longing and nostalgia, but without sentimentality and the soundtrack she shares here is such a treat: a Gershwin cover by Kate Bush; a Purcell lament sung by Alison Moyet. If you follow my show on Surrey Hills Radio you might hear me finding an excuse to give them airplay sometime soon. Anyway, this imaginative guest is wartime romance author Davina Blake (who also writes historical novels as Deborah Swift), and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her Undercover Soundtrack.

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by crime and psychological thriller writer Debbie Bennett @debjbennett

I always wanted to be musical. I’m sixties-born, but identify most with the 1980s – the era of the New Romantics and the beginnings of computer-generated music, but I always had the hidden desire to be a full-on rock chick with my AC-DC, Whitesnake and Rainbow albums! Yes – I did the whole biker-jacket and leather mini look too (see proof here!). I wanted to play music too, but we didn’t have a piano and it took me four years of compulsory music lessons at school to realise I was never going to get past Chopsticks! My teenage daughter is a talented musician and singer, but I don’t think the genes come down my side of the family.

So I turned my creative impulses to writing – firstly fantasy and more recently crime. My first crime novel was dark. Very dark. Part crime, part psychological thriller, we’re dealing with street drugs and rent boys, but while there are police, the story is told from the point of view of the ordinary people involved. And music plays its part in setting mood and tone.

Fateful meeting

The hero in Hamelin’s Childis Michael, who we follow through another two books – Paying the Piper and Calling the Tune. Michael goes clubbing to celebrate his seventeenth birthday and meets Eddie, after which life is never going to be the same again. Michael’s journey from middle-class suburban naivety through heroin addiction and out the other side is Alice Cooper’s I Never Cry, particularly when he’s thinking about jumping off a motorway bridge.

They’d all done their best, in their own way, to help him forget the past and he couldn’t blame them for not understanding that he didn’t want to forget. He needed to remember. It was the only way he could make any sense out of it all.’

Sometimes it’s not even the lyrics is it? It’s the mood of the piece – the actual notes in a certain sequence that can instantly transport you to a certain place or time in your life. Or even just an emotion. Synaesthesia, they call it…

Lee says, referring to the best of his mother’s boyfriends, the man who eventually decided he preferred son to mother, at which point Lee was out on the streets. Runaway Train came out in 1992 (or so my CD case tells me) and it was many, many years later when I found it on Youtube and saw for the first time that the accompanying video is all about missing kids. Strange but true.

In Paying the Piper, we first meet my bad-boy Lenny, who started out as a bit-player but I soon realised was way more involved than I’d first thought. Lenny is Skid Row’s 18 And Life, albeit with a lot more money and a public school education. It’s not until Calling the Tune that we learn of Lenny’s real childhood and he becomes far more ambiguous and complex. Lenny’s story continues into Rat’s Tale and new release Ratline and his music becomes softer and more uncertain as we get inside his head. Now it’s less rock and more Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (the Seekers version – way better than Bob Dylan, in my opinion).

I can’t in all honesty say I listen to music while writing, because I find any noise hugely distracting when I’m working (although a playlist on my iPhone is a Godsend in an open-plan office in the day job). But I do find that music fits the mood of the moment when I’m writing and I’ll subconsciously look for and play certain tracks – even if only in my mind.

Debbie Bennett claims to get her inspiration from the day job in law enforcement. She can’t talk about a lot of the stuff she’s seen and done over the years, but it stews and matures in her mind and often comes out in some twisted form in fiction many years later. She’d tell you more, but then she’d have to kill you afterwards. Her website is here and you can find her on Twitter as @debjbennett

My guest this week says she was always secretly a rock chick, and has provided pictorial evidence to prove it. When she turned her creative impulses to writing, music helped create the mood and tone. She writes gritty crime with a heavy dose of psychological thriller, and drew on a aural landscape of Alice Cooper, Soul Asylum, Bon Jovi and Skid Row. She is Debbie Bennett and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her Undercover Soundtrack.